Los Angeles has always been very kind to me, and for that reason, I hope you find some maps that you really like. Many thanks to KTLA's Dave Malkoff for taking an interest.

Kind regards, — the 59 King

(Original Blog post follows.)=====

I'm real keen on this railway map of Los Angeles, California [gmap]. It's in the sweet spot of useful, interesting, deep, well-designed, and gorgeous. It's rare that a map can hit all of those high points, so it's important that we recognize it when one does.

I was in LA recently for y'alls Film Festival. I stayed downtown. I guess I had never realized that LA had such a robust bus/light rail system. Seriously, Angelenos have the rep of being car-centric and unconcerned with public transit. But there it was; and it seemed pretty useful.

Then when I tried to discuss this with the people who live in LA, they thought it was crazy. They were way more averse to the idea of using public transit than I've seen in any other place. Folks in STL slag on riding the bus all the time, but those folks I talked to in LA had, like, third-hand horror stories about the inevitability of being beheaded within seconds of boarding a train. It was a trip.

Here the bogeyman against riding the bus boils down to race prejudice and class identity. But in LA, the people I talked to were on some sick, snuff-film-horror fantasy justification stuff. It was strange.

[tldr: the 59 King has now officially rated your public transit acceptance as "singularly deficient". LA, Step up your game.]

Also a good time to point out that I can only tell so much from a map -- even a map as information-rich as this one. The readers of this blog, steeped in the knowledge of the the histories of their own cities as many of them are -- are an endless source of personal edification, and they provide a great service when they send along information like this. It helps more than you know, and I'm always thankful when it happens.

22 Comments

I’m a subway enthusiast; didn’t know LA had a system that far back! Very interesting! I haven’t been to LA yet but will get there someday soon just to ride the subways! I plan to ride the subways in America’s major cities!

You’re more than welcome. Real glad you liked it, Lupe. It’s a fascinating place, for sure. Make sure to check out our other LA maps (http://www.bigmapblog.com/tag/los-angeles/); there’s a wealth of info there, for the curious… and I imagine a native Angeleno will find many things in these maps that the rest of us would miss.

Indeed, when the transit systems were ripped out, very few people lamented the loss. There were some, but no outrage among the public in general, no mass demonstrations in the streets. Just a shrugging of the shoulders and an attitude of “well that’s progress, I guess.” A lot of factors came together to remove these systems.

The main one was that these systems were generally NOT able to make a profit. These systems were all privately owned (until the LA County government took over in 1958…by that time there was not much left to save…but to be fair, it was the government that did rip out the remaining instructure over the following 5 years).

Because they never (rarely) made a profit, the streetcar companies could not upgrade their systems, tracks, cars and stations. Because they could not upgrade the cars, they became old and in a bad state of repair, which led to a bad reputation for the streetcars, which was one of the main reasons why the streetcars vanished.

To drive my point home, I would note that only USA cities that continued to operate streetcars and never remove them (basically San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and New Orleans) were also cities where the private streetcar companies exited the scene very early on, and the municipal governments took over the system. San Francisco started the MUNI in 1912. Pittsburgh Railways went bankrupt twice, with the government finally taking control in 1951. SEPTA in Philadelphia was formed in 1964-65. (New Orleans a bit of an exception with the public agency formed in 1979.)

In Los Angeles, by the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, only 10 years after streetcar service ended, it had become abundantly clear that ripping out the streetcars instead of upgrading the system had been a big mistake. It took another 17 years to begin fixing that mistake.

By the way, I have lived in LA for 20 years, much of time without a car (though I do have one now). I lived in various urban locales including central Hollywood and Downtown hard on to Skid Row in a new loft building development. I never hesitated to take public transit at any time to get around, when I was without a car. Like any other urban environment, it can be dangerous and you have to be aware of your surroundings, but I never let that dictate where I would allow myself to travel (Full disclosure: I am a large white man, 6’4″ and not thin, so that may have had something to do with nobody ever bothering me.)

Forgive me if it’s there and I’m idiotically overlooking it, but I don’t see the year on the map itself. The reason I bring that up is that Sanborn Insurance maps have shown me that the Silver Lake house I live in was built in 1906 yet that rectangular section of that community (bordered to the north and south by Reservoir and Marathon in this map) remains entirely unsubdivided and undeveloped. This is a phenomenal map and I’m thrilled you shared it, I’m just curious where the year came from as I’m wondering if it might have actually been created a few years earlier.

It’s a good question and thanks for asking it. Short answer is: Yes it’s entirely possible; perhaps even “probable”, now that I look at it.

The Library of Congress has Dec 24, 1906 stamped as the map’s indoc date… meaning that that’s the date they took it into their collection. It’s entirely possible that the map was published before that.

There are several maps on the Big Map Blog with imperfect or “best guess” provenance. In most cases, I’ve attempted to indicate this (by giving a range, or some such). But in many cases, such as this one, this was overlooked in error. In several other instances an incorrect date has been displayed because of a data entry error (frequently mine, but occasionally the archive’s).

Perhaps you or someone else familiar with L.A. in this time period could figure out a range of dates it could be, based on development? I’d be quite happy to amend the info presented here.

And thanks again for letting me know. I’m always quite happy to have my errors (small or large) pointed out — or additional information/context provided — in the interests of increasing accuracy and utility. -t59K

Well, I stand corrected. I dove into the Sanborn Insurance map collection available online and what I thought had been a 1906 map showing that rectangle (mentioned in my previous comment) fully added to the grid was actually a 1919 map. Unfortunately those two years also represent the gap existing in the available Sanborn collection so I can’t get any closer to when that parcel was subdivided, but at least I’ve got confirmation that this railway map could actually be 1906 after all.

Sounds like a very cool resource. What kind of resolution are the downloadable PDFs scanned at? If you have a free second and would care to, you can email me a sample PDF and I’d love to take a look: king@bigmapblog.com .

Actually, that isn’t really true, the system(s) were/was in steep decline thanks to over-regulation by the PUC and land grabs by what is now CalTrans for the Freeway system. But GM did assist in the coup-de-grace at the very end.

Los Angeles’ greatest sin was to discontinue and dismantle it’s entire railway system and abandoning it’s true urban city for the ugly and boring suburbs. =\ if only the city knew what they were getting themselves into….

Not many people today know of or treasure the historic core.. A hidden gem of LA.

Considering you went to a film festival, the fools you talked to either live in the Westside or the suburbs, and those fools all contribute to the traffic anyway. None of them are REAL Angelenos.

Los Angeles, before World War II had not only a large rail transit system, but the largest in The United States! At some 1,200 miles, our old rail system was even larger than the NYC subway (Don’t tell that fact to a NY’er, because they will go into convulsions).

Los Angeles did not really become a “car culture” place until after World War II, when the freeway system was built and all the white people ran off to the suburbs to because they were scared of the colored folks. Before then, Los Angeles looked like every other big city in the USA.

The old rail system was dismantled in the early 1960s. There were efforts to bring it back in the ’60s and ’70s but residents didn’t want it at the time. Finally in 1980, Los Angeles Coutny voters approved a sales tax increase to fund a rail transit system. 10 years later, the first line opened. Today, our rail system carries 301,500 people daily. By the end of this year, we will have about 88 miles of rail transit, where none existed 21 years ago.

Fair enough, and I get what you’re getting at, and I’d make the same conclusions if I were in your shoes. But it wasn’t just FF folks that I talked to (and I wouldn’t talk with them about transit, anyway). Full disclosure: it was white, downtown yuppies that spoke to it most directly and ignorantly, and I’m sure I heard many earfuls from various exurban ponces, but that wasn’t what I used to draw that conclusion. I did my due diligence, and I can also report honestly that I heard Mexican-Americans in North Hollywood shitting on transit and got an earful from a Colombian National and an El Salvadorian, both making their homes in downtown LA, who warned me against such things — going so far as to offer to come pick me up so I wouldn’t pursue such a foolish course of action.

It must be said, though, that I get what you’re getting at, and I’m on board with you making these distinctions. I think it’s important, and it’s what I’d do, in the same situation.

I live in LA and take the buses and trains pretty much anywhere I need to go. Bus service has DEFINITELY improved in the 4 years that I’ve been here, but I’m pretty sure most of the people who talk about how terrible it is have never even attempted it. When I tell people I love riding the bus, they look at me like I’m crazy, and it’s pretty sad because the system is great.

Excellent map! Public transportation in the greater LA area needs to grow. I’ve ridden the metro link and the subways — very quick and effective. I have heard the same kinds of things about riding the bus. Did you see the article in the New York Times (Wednesday I think) about using mapping software to recreate Civil War Battlefield from Lee’s point of view?

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